Mark 8:31-38
There has been a lot of buzz both online and in conversations all over the country about a certain Super Bowl ad. For two years now, something called the He Gets Us campaign has been purchasing and running advertisements during prime-time sporting events. The ads have a high production value, and cost millions to run amongst the ads for the latest electric cars and the newest gimmick offered by banks and credit card companies. They usually have little to no dialogue, and depict people of diverse ages, genders, and ethnicities. The He Gets Us commercials always include a short statement, only a few words, about who Jesus is and what Jesus does. Every ad culminates in the signature phrase- He Gets Us. If you haven’t seen this year’s ad, I would encourage you to take a look- it can be found online with a quick Google search. The ad depicts a variety of people in pairs, one kneeling to wash the other’s feet. These pairs are presented as icons of opposing groups or ideologies. A white suburban mom kneels to wash the feet of a Latina immigrant woman who has just emerged from a bus with her infant in her arms and her belongings in a trash bag. A police officer kneels in an alley to wash the feet of a Black man. A white rancher kneels beside an indigenous elder and washes his feet in the desert. A preppy blonde teenager sits on the floor in a high school hallway pouring water from her water bottle over the feet of another teenager with short hair dyed bright red. A male priest in a collar with a rosary hung around his neck kneels at the feet of a young person in shorts sitting beside the roller skates they have removed to allow the priest to wash their feet. A middle-aged couple have stopped in the middle of gardening to wash the feet of a young woman in a hijab. Two young adults on opposite sides of a conflict sit between a protest and a counterprotest, washing one another’s feet while the two sides scream at one another over their heads. The commercial ends with a few short phrases flashing across the screen. Jesus didn’t teach hate. He washed feet. He gets us. All of us.
It is a beautiful commercial. The music is well chosen, the pacing is accessible, the artistic images are beautiful, detailed, and clear in their message. With 123 million people watching the Super Bowl this year, it was well-timed to reach a large audience in a country where people are losing faith in religion at a precipitous pace. The stated goal of the He Gets Us campaign is to help people see the story of Jesus as a story of love and remind everyone that Jesus belongs to all of us. Many of us, myself included, have had multiple conversations about it since it first aired, and that alone is an amazing feat considering the constant barrage of marketing and news reports we all receive from the moment we wake up until the moment we close our eyes. I couldn’t tell you a single specific thing that’s been advertised to me in the last two days, but I remember the ad about Jesus.
Since it aired, there have been a lot of think-pieces written, a lot of Facebook posts and comments sections filled with strong opinions, and a lot of interesting conversations among Christians. I honestly don’t know how the non-Christian and the unchurched feel about it because everyone I’ve heard talking about it in my own life is decidedly Christian. We have a habit of talking amongst ourselves to a point that we forget we are supposed to be talking to the world.
The prevailing opinions are these:
- The commercials this year cost the campaign $20 million to air, and that’s after production costs. Many are saying that this money could have been spent better making an impact in the material lives of suffering people in our country and abroad.
- In a time when people are more skeptical about organized religion than ever, a Jesus-centric campaign is of vital importance. It has gotten people talking about Jesus, and that is a good thing.
- The funding for these ads comes from a variety of sources, including individuals and organizations who have also invested significantly in lobbying for anti-LGBTQ and anti-reproductive rights legislation. The campaign amounts to a bait and switch by presenting an unprejudiced Jesus who does not discriminate, while being tied to people who promote discriminatory policies.
- The ad is well-done, says only true things about Jesus, and should be celebrated and shared widely. It is good PR for our Lord, and that is never a bad thing.
- We Christians are doing exactly what we are always accused of- dividing ourselves and fretting over the speck in each other’s eyes instead of tending to our own logs.
Honestly, I think I agree with all of these. I think I also have more thinking, and more listening, and more praying to do on the subject. But I keep coming back to the Jesus of it all. Jesus, who is never depicted explicitly in this ad, but is nevertheless the subject at hand.
I have to wonder if Jesus would admonish us in our arguing. You are setting your minds not on divine things but human things. Like Peter, perhaps we are letting our ideals and our ideas about what a Messiah is supposed to look like get in the way of seeing the truth of who Jesus is. Like Peter, we can get it right and then get it wrong and repeat that cycle over and over until we see the risen Christ for ourselves. Jesus keeps telling us that those who want to save their life will lose it, and those who lose their life for his sake and for the sake of the gospel will save it. Jesus has been clear from the very beginning that our own self-preservation can never be our motivation. Peter was horrified to hear that the man he had just named the Messiah is anticipating his own suffering and death. He finally finds the promised hero, only to lose him? No way, he says, taking Jesus aside. Peter, like so many of Jesus’s earliest followers, is seeking a rescuer, and instead he gets a savior.
When we engage with our faith from a place of self-preservation, it shows. When we go out and evangelize because we fear hell if we don’t, it shows. When we stay inside our own walls and our own circles, arguing amongst ourselves about who is allowed to call themselves Christian and who isn’t, it shows. When we begin to ask more and more of our young people because we fear that our own way of doing things will not survive to the next generation, it shows. When we seek to grow our churches not for the sake of more people knowing the love of Jesus but for the sake of keeping our own doors open, it shows. When we have our minds set on human things, it shows, and the cultural skepticism toward the institutional Church is the result. That is the one thing I think we can all take from this commercial campaign, at least for now. There is no invitation to a specific church or denomination in it. There is no altar call. There is only the story of Jesus, told as faithfully as the creators can manage. The Divine things, Jesus and God’s love for all that God has made, Christ’s call to servanthood, are front and center. People are looking at us, at the Church, to try to understand the Divine. What kind of faith will we show them?
Mother A Writes 